The article was quite clear about that, yes, and it’s clearly impossible. It’s a perpetual motion machine scam.
Carriers are already full of people, ordinance, planes, jet fuel and suchlike.
At best this will replace an expensive tanker fleet with a far more expensive nuclear-powerer-fuel-production fleet, and certainly won’t allow ships to produce their own fuelor avoid withdrawing from operations for refueling.
This is interesting. I can conceive of a nuclear powered carrier that is able to make its own jet-fuel on board. At face value that would seem to be really useful. Whether the concept ever proved feasible is another matter.
That said, an aircraft carrier is very much an all-the-eggs-in-one-basket kind of a concept. AIUI, that is why they typically have a support fleet. They are just a bit too vulnerable without the help and the stakes are high. Adding yet another egg to the basket might not be that great an idea.
They just announced they will test on ships in 2016 with live multi-round in 2018, seems like they are making steady progress.
Moderators, please place this in the special archival section for time-capsule posts.
If you guys actually read the Navy’s press release (I’ve not even read the OP’s article, only the actual Naval sources) you’ll see it’s no type of scam it all. The Navy is describing it simply as a technology to use energy to convert seawater into jet fuel. They aren’t claiming it is net energy positive, or that a ship could run solely off of the fuel created by the process and also power the process that creates the fuel. Instead they’re really just talking about powering very small test planes right now, and maybe someday being able to use it to produce fighter jet fuel in a pinch.
This would only make sense on a nuclear powered ship, in which case the fuel while not infinite, is very long lasting and thus the ship wouldn’t need to “refuel” the seawater–to-jet fuel process constantly because the energy for that would be coming from a nuclear reactor which would be expected to last for decades.
Seems pretty common & nothing extra special to me, but YMMV. (unless that was the point all along 
)
I would think at first, this technology would be used to extend a deployment, rather than replace conventional tankers. As it becomes a more mature system, it can be ramped up in scale. As an earlier post pointed out, the Navy doesn’t care about expense as much as it does accomplishing a mission.
Seems like the fuel would be close to carbon neutral, assuming that one uses a green electricity source and that the CO2 emitted by the burning of the fuel would be offset by CO2 dissolving into the ocean to replace the CO2 extracted to make the fuel.
If that’s the case, could this technology also be used to make gasoline for cars etc.? Sure, you’d need a ton of electricity, but for all I know, ramping up wind/solar/nuclear power generation may be easier than replacing millions of internal combustion vehicles with electric vehicles.
The big question remains: what is the source of energy?
Nuclear is the only high density-high availability source they could use. Nuclear subs aren’t going to be able to produce and store fuel for other ships and have little need for fossil fuels.
That leaves nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Producing fuel for other ships in the fleet doesn’t really solve the problem, in fact, makes things worse since the carrier is out of service while it’s fueling other ships.
That leaves producing fuel for it’s aircraft. Maybe. But the article specifically mentions fueling ships.
Retrofitting other ships with reactors to produce fuel? I don’t see it. A reactor powerful enough to do the job has to be designed into the ship from the beginning.
There’s something seriously fishy about this. Especially given the failure to talk about the energy source. Sounds a lot like the magic bomb-sniffing wands the Pentagon bought.
The energy source is probably a generator in a lab or something. This is being done by research scientist–it’s not ready for deployment to sea. All they’ve tested is a small unmanned plane being flown with the fuel.
There’s no conspiracy or woo here, you guys are reading more into the article than the Navy has actually said in its actual press releases.
Almost certainly this would, once it reaches true deployment, be used by nuclear aircraft carriers to generate fuel for their planes. Any sort of system to actually replace fuel for all the ships would be much further off, because obviously ships use a lot more fuel than planes. I’m assuming, anyway, that a fleet of ships uses far more fuel than said fleet’s aircraft just based on size of the engines and such but maybe I’m wrong.
Further, the reality is the Navy will be happy to continue using conventional sources of fuel. I think in the immediate term they just want to have this science being done so that down the road they may have the option to go in another direction if they need to do so. A lot of the oil majors have projected around 2070 is when we’ll start to see significant production declines and given the slow political acceptance of global warming it’s possible it could happen much sooner. In that scenario it makes sense for the Navy to be doing research now on alternative sources of high energy fuel.
It was 20 years after the military started working on GPS technology that it was used in a war. Military research is about long horizons, and that’s the context this needs to be taken in.
If a future ship is going to have a nuclear reactor to produce fuel, why make the fuel? Just use the reactor to propel the ship. Anything else is a waste.
Retrofitting ships with good sized reactors is not going to happen.
It is woo for ship fueling purposes.
As I said, you’d use the nuclear reactor to power this process to produce jet fuel. Please read the actual NRL release on this and not other articles link.
As for it being a waste, I guess I’ll stop pointing out that both the Navy article and I personally have said multiple times this isn’t intended to be net energy positive. It’s about logistics and independent supply concerns. If they were only concerned with maximal energy efficiency no, this would not be something they’d be researching.
The only people who think this technology sounds fanciful are the ones who haven’t actually read about it and have taken third hand source remarks on it and ran it out of the park. This has not been touted as anything, thus far, but lab research science to prove a specific process that the Navy has been working on is capable of producing jet fuel from sea water, that’s it. The rest of the stuff you guys are huffing and puffing to “debunk” has never been put forth by the actual scientists in the first place.
It could.
The Navy hasn’t said it will be used to fuel ships. But no, it doesn’t have to be woo. Woo is something that isn’t possible, it’s certainly possible to use modular generators to eventually produce all of a ship’s more energy dense fuel while at sea. These wouldn’t even need to be capable of keeping up with a ship’s fuel consumption at peak, instead they could simply delay how long it is until a ship needs to refuel. If you push that delay enough, then a ship will only need to refuel at base, thus eliminating the need for tanker fleets entirely.
One possible path: The Navy builds a handful of new ships, from the hull up, that are nuclear-powered fuel ships. Instead of putting a tanker in a fleet to refuel all of the many fossil-fuel vessels, you put a new nuclear vessel in its place. You could put a nuclear reactor on every ship instead, but that would require a whole heck of a lot of retrofitting on a whole heck of a lot of existing ships. It’s a lot easier to build one entirely new ship for a fleet than it is to extensively overhaul every ship in the fleet.
“Lisa, get in here…in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!”
I strongly suspect that the navy is assuming the energy will come from a nuclear reactor, either on the carrier or on a purpose-built “fuel ship.” The $3-6/gallon figure probably treats the electricity as free. If you were to build this thing on land and power it off the electrical gid, the cost would undoubtably be far higher.
Just a few comments: a carrier will use somewhere around 25 million gallons of fuel during a deployment just for aircraft. To use that much fuel, a carrier must be supported by generous numbers of underway replenishments by oilers, which carry a maximum of 180,000 gallons of fuel, and go from port to carrier battle group back to port back to carrier, etc. A carrier uses about 10 or 12 times more fuel than a surface combatant (like a destroyer).
To reduce or eliminate that logistical load for oilers is, in the words of Joe Biden, a big fucking deal… for the Navy. It’s hard to make the case this this technology would have much commercial application, at least at this point.
There is no chance whatsoever that existing ships would be converted to nuclear power in order to obtain this capability. My rough ballpark guess is that it would probably take about a billion dollars, maybe more, to convert an existing destroyer or cruiser to a nuclear configuration, and in all likelihood it would take a couple years worth of drydock time to do it. Consider that the Navy performed an analysis in 2009 to determine the cost of designing a new-build cruiser that would use nuclear power, and found that it would cost roughly $700 million to have nuclear power on that ship. The premium on retrofitting a nuclear power plant to and existing ship would reflect the costs of removing all the hull, mechanical, and engineering that exists on ships that is designed around the use of a turbine engine that is remarkably similar to those found on a 747.
The viability of this concept is probably determined by an analysis of the fully burdened cost of fuel. In other words, which scenario is cheaper?
Remove fuel from the ground, probably in some distant land. Ship the fuel to the US for processing. Ship the fuel to various distribution points around the world. Maintain a fleet of 14 oilers, including civilian crewmen. Use the oilers to schedule frequent meetups with carriers at sea. Deliver fuel to those carriers.
Probably build a small number (3? 4?) of ships, perhaps with nuclear power, to follow carrier battle groups around. Pay to develop and sustain those ships, which deliver fuel to the carriers and escorts. Maintain a smaller fleet of oilers for surface combatant use, maybe a third of what we have today.
I can’t find a specific figure for how much the fully burdened cost of fuel is today for the Navy, but it is goddamned sure to be a hell of a lot higher than $6. This is a poor comparison, but the cost of a gallon of fuel for an air-to-air refuelling is around $35, and the cost to send a gallon of fuel to Afghanistan is about $20.
Couldn’t the Navy just transition to hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles and skip all this complex chemistry? I admit I am highly uncertain about how practical it is to power aircraft with hydrogen.
Hydrogen has a lower energy density per fuel tank of whatever size. So in essence, the aircraft would have to give up range and/or speed. It just isn’t practical at all for any military application.
However, I do look forward to the day when F/A-18s can be powered by the cleanest fuel of all: hopes and dreams.
We could skip that stage entirely and just drop bombs from unicorns.
The XAU-23:22 Stealth Unicorn – sometimes dubbed the “Rainbow Widowmaker” – was a complete failure in its single flight in 1997. It never made it out of the hangar again after maintenance crews discovered that unicorn excrement looks like, and tastes as good as, cotton candy.